Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu: American Representations of India, 1721-1893

Michael J. Altman

Abstract

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Americans did not write about Hinduism. They did write a lot about India, however. In their representations of India, American writers described “heathens,” “Hindoos,” and, eventually, “Hindus.” Before Americans wrote about “Hinduism,” they wrote about “heathenism,” “the religion of the Hindoos,” and “Brahmanism.” This book argues that Americans debated the nature of religion, sought alternatives to American Protestantism, and hailed the supremacy of white Protestant American identity through their representations of religion in India. Representation ... More

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Americans did not write about Hinduism. They did write a lot about India, however. In their representations of India, American writers described “heathens,” “Hindoos,” and, eventually, “Hindus.” Before Americans wrote about “Hinduism,” they wrote about “heathenism,” “the religion of the Hindoos,” and “Brahmanism.” This book argues that Americans debated the nature of religion, sought alternatives to American Protestantism, and hailed the supremacy of white Protestant American identity through their representations of religion in India. Representations of India reflected debates about America. Americans used the heathen, Hindoo, and Hindu Other as a foil for representing themselves. Americans of all sorts imagined India for their own purposes. Cotton Mather, Hannah Adams, and Joseph Priestley engaged the larger European Enlightenment project of classifying and comparing religion in India. Evangelical missionaries used images of “Hindoo heathenism” to raise support at home. Unitarian Protestants found a kindred spirit in the writings of Bengali reformer Rammohun Roy. Popular magazines and common schoolbooks used the image of dark, heathen, despotic India to buttress Protestant, white, democratic American identity. Transcendentalists and Theosophists imagined the contemplative and esoteric religion of India as an alternative to materialist American Protestantism. Hindu delegates and American speakers at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions engaged in a protracted debate about the definition of religion in the industrializing United States. The questions of American identity, classification, representation, and the definition of “religion” that animated descriptions of heathens, Hindoos, and Hindus in the past still animate American debates today.

End Matter

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